Your Life in August
April 21st 2020 — Carlisle, Massachusetts
4/21/2020 — Carlisle, Massachusetts
We’ve all been driving ourselves crazy as we game scenarios for what comes next. I shuttle maniacally between Airbnb and Streeteasy — hunting for short term country rentals or long term homes in New York. Day after day I swap texts and articles with pod member Farmer Andrew as we debate and converse and try to comprehend the fog of information that is as amorphous and unknowable as SARS-Cov-2, which sound like a rebel droid but is in fact Sith.
What will you be doing this August? Depends whom you ask. From what I can tell, two camps have emerged in our not-so-great-more-like-Ecuador-country. (Not to impugn Ecuador.) Camp Get It On and Camp I ❤️ Living.
Which knows best how this summer will play out?
Get It On
This virus is not that terrible. It’s not a bad flu season, we’re not stupid over here, but it’s not The Walking Dead, either.
The mass casualties Andrew Cuomo, UK researchers and the press perseverated about in March never materialized in April. Yes, 40,000 dead Americans and counting is absolutely horrible and should be far lower if we had an earlier, smarter response, but in a country our size, 40k extra dead people is more Edvard Munch depressing than Hieronymus Bosch End-of-Times.
Extending the lockdown is an overreaction based more on anxiety than fact. It’s good we shut down when we did because the disease is real and highly contagious, but hey, mission accomplished. If Danish kids are back in school, so should ours. We slowed the spread. Testing is inadequate so whatever death rate you see reported in the news is actually far, far lower. We’ll continue to ramp up testing and treatment capacity for a very long time to come; meanwhile, tag me in.
Living requires risk. Drive a car? Enjoy a swim? You wake up and face the world each and every day. You got this.
Healthy people wearing face masks while walking on empty sidewalks, not being able to dine outdoors, having liquor stores and other retail outlets stay closed is more than ridiculous. It’s offensive. It spreads more fear than the damn virus.
Here’s what to do: open up the economy gradually starting right now. We’re not talking Madison Square Garden or the House of Yes, we’re talking barbershops and salons, kindergartens and outdoor businesses. Keep adding testing and treatment capacity and keep opening up places. Slow and steady. Older people and people with underlying conditions will continue to lie low until there’s better treatment.
By August we’ll have adjusted to a new normal. There will be a daily depressing drumbeat of awful news stories about old and sick people dying. If there are thermometers we’ll get our temperature taken more frequently. We’ll drop off groceries and have Zoom birthday parties for older relatives and frail neighbors. Hospitals will be pushed to their utmost limit and all healthcare workers will be even more heroic than they already are.
We’ll also all be earning and spending money. We’ll have purpose. People will get married, mourned, confirmed, Bar Mitzvah’ed. They’ll buy and sell homes, they’ll create exciting new businesses or write essays on Medium for no money.
Sure, every once in a while we’ll have to wear masks and endure a few weeks of shutdown because of local flare ups, but they’ll pass. We know the Federal government is a disaster and extreme partisanship is actually not partisan but one-sided. Democrats are sane but self-serving. It’s the Republicans who are Putin/Infowars/AR-15 crazy. They can’t govern a Happy Meal, let alone a country. But that’s OK, we’ll endure regardless of crappy politics. Always have.
We’re woke enough to avoid retrograde gendered language to describe our mentality; so we’ll call this the rugged response.
Last thought. Your shortness of breath is statistically proven to be your anxiety, not a drop-in-the-bucket infection rate. They should rename it the Mostly Mild, Rarely Acute Respiratory Syndrome with High Comorbidity of Anxiety. Or MMVRAS-wHCoA. Which isn’t very catchy.
I ❤️ Living
Hello, people, do we really have to articulate that life is precious? Think maxed out hospitals and infected health workers aren’t deeply problematic for your personal health if you get this, never mind for others whom you should also be thinking about? What about the impact to the supply chain with meatpacking facility closures as the disease moves into the heartland?
This is an unprecedented, once-in-a-century global pandemic with many unknowns for contagion, morbidity, vulnerability, aerosolized spread, long term consequences, treatment regimens and so on. What we do know is millions have fallen sick and way more than normal (otherwise healthy, not just old) people are dying. You can doubt the media’s numbers and theorize the death rate all you like. We’re not going to take it for granted that healthy people won’t get sick and die.
In other words, you go out first. No, not really. No one goes anywhere.
You can call our desire for everyone to stay sheltered a fearful overreaction, a privilege, an anxious disorder. It’s not important what you think. At the end of the day, this is sober risk assessment.
You mentioned cars. We love to drive cars, but only when they have airbags, ABS brakes, seat belts, crumple zones, backup cameras and dozens of other safety features mandated by the Feds, because, sidebar, that’s the purpose of government. We also all have valid driver’s licenses, car insurance, registrations and annual inspection stickers. As do you.
Sober. Risk. Assessment.
Since you mentioned death rates and a bad flu, let’s nerd out for a minute. If there’s a Covid-19 death rate of any digit at all with social distancing, and flu mortality rates are around 0.1% without distancing — and we know Covid-19 deaths are double digit in hard hit countries with socialized medicine— then many in this country (of fractured healthcare and millions of under insured people) will get very sick.
You say we’ll never know the rates of asymptomatic or mildly sick people. We say, who the hell cares? Hospitals are full to the point of breaking. People who are sick enough to need to go to the hospital die way, way more frequently than people who are sick with any other virus we’ve ever heard of.
The coronavirus today has a reported death rate of 4.84%. Now imagine if we stopped sheltering with our crappy supply chains, a disaster of a president and no universal healthcare coverage. Would it go to… 8%? 10%? 20%?
Here’s the good news: we can avoid the pain if we continue to shelter in place for... we don’t know how much longer, but longer. That’s the point.
We’ll stay out of the way and let the medical experts handle this. You think you’re going to rodeos and factory floors in August? We’ll tell you what you’ll be doing in in August. You’ll be texting us to ask what to watch again on Netflix because there’s been no new Hollywood productions for months.
Oh, and about face masks on empty sidewalks? When we go out, we wear a mask, even if the street appears empty and especially in grocery stores. Why? Because if you’re healthy and always wear a mask, it means your sick neighbor will always wear a mask too. Then fewer people get sick.
Smart, right?
But if we don’t do all that, if we reopen too quickly, there will be huge flare ups in North Carolina and Tennessee and Georgia — the three red states opening up right now. You think people will go out ever again if late April openings lead to June disasters? You think workers will show up to Amazon warehouses or people will even buy groceries? You think they’ll pay rent? August will be worse than April.
That’s not fear talking, that’s cool calm calculation. You call yourself rugged? That’s short term thinking my friend. We’re long term resilient.
Now we’ll go ahead and brush our shoulders off.
Which camp am I in? I try to be balanced: I buy my own food because I’m healthy and I think it’s exploitive to ask others to risk themselves for me. I’m socially distant meaning I actually socialize with people from a distance outside, I’ve even made new friends at the farm. We realistically can’t all be locked down forever, especially if you’re young and healthy, but then again, just look at my dateline.
I left my home in Manhattan to live for months in a rural studio Airbnb with a hotplate. It’s less dense out here in Carlisle, Massachusetts, so it’s safer and I’m very happy with keeping everything shut down until we have truly widespread, easy-to-access and accurate testing; better treatments for sick people and a functioning supply chain so I can get like, hand sanitizer, which is still nowhere to be found. Asking service workers to endure an extended lockdown is awful, but it’s better than the alternative. Giving them way more money than $1,200 seems like a wise investment to me. Kind of like making sure cars have airbags and ABS brakes. Be safe, save lives.
